Established in 1991, the UCLA Terasaki Center has been a platform for research on Japan. Our distinguished faculty, students, postdoctoral fellows, visiting scholars, and the board of advisors have been contributing to the field of Japanese studies for over 20 years.

The Terasaki Center sponsors a vast array of events throughout the year. With its colloquium series, the Center brings academics from diverse fields to UCLA each year. Special workshops and annual conferences bring leading scholars to discuss topics relating to Japan.

Center programs were established with strong support from the local community to promote research and instruction in Japanese studies, with a recent focus on the profound transformations unfolding in contemporary Japanese society.

The Terasaki Center is actively expanding support for faculty and graduate students, building relationships with other universities as well as Japan and Japanese Studies related organizations, and enhancing its role in the community.

Dr. Junko Yamazaki

2016-2017 Postdoctoral Fellow

Junko Yamazaki joined the department in the fall of 2017. In her research and teaching, she explores questions of film and media aesthetics as part of larger historical transformations of the conditions of cultural production and exchange, modern technological media-making practices, and forms of sociality and subjectivity. An interdisciplinary scholar by training (a joint PhD in cinema & media studies and East Asian studies), she also strives to situate her study of cinema in the broader intellectual and aesthetic traditions and debates.

It was her interest in the relationship between cinema and modernity, film spectatorship and hermeneutic practices, and diegesis and film’s historicity that inspired her research on a popular form of period film known as jidaigeki. She is currently working on a book manuscript on jidaigeki’s relation to postwar Japan’s lived present. Her article on jidaigeki musical, "Calico-World in Pastel Colors: The Aesthetics of Gender in 1950s Toei Jidaigeki" will be published in A Companion to Japanese Cinema (David Desser Ed., Blackwell).

Her research interests also include other media and art forms. She participated in the inter-university workshops on the early postwar "politics and literature" debate in Japan, and her annotated translations of Ara Masato’s “Second Youth” (with William H. Bridges IV) and Hirano Ken’s “An Antithesis” have been published in The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism (Atsuko Ueda, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, & Hirokazu Toeda, 2017). She is also preparing an article on postwar avant-garde composers’ engagement with the film medium, and the ways in which the specific economic conditions and institutional setting and practices fostered a vibrant film music culture in 1950s and 1960s Japan.